IBM SearchManager/2 AddOn

Frequently asked Questions

Q: I need SM/2 support for files with format xy. Can you include a filter
in your AddOn DLL? I'll even pay for it!

A: The main problem here is that the documented API for SM/2 extensions
does not include functions to add new filters to SM/2!

Thus the only way to support new file formats is to convert them into
another format already known to SM/2. This is the way my DLL implements HTML
support, it just converts (via an external program) the HTML file into
plain ASCII and let SM/2 index that ASCII file.

If you can provide me a filter program, which quickly(!) converts your
favourite file format into ASCII or another format known to SM/2, send me an
email and I'll add this feature to my AddOn DLL.

Q: I need support for Postscript/Acrobat files. There is a program
called pstotext
which converts them to ASCII. Can you change your AddOn DLL to use it?

A: I could, but I will not do this!

If you ever used pstotext, you should have noticed that it's working well,
but very slow. It can take several minutes to convert a single
postscript file. Thus it is not efficient to do this conversion each time
SM/2 accesses the contents of the document.

But it is already possible to use my AddOn DLL to index these files via
SM/2:

Just convert each Postscript/Acrobat file to
ASCII using ps2text and store them into files with the same name but different
file extension (e.g. ".txt"). You can keep them in the same directory as the
original files, but don't forget to let SM/2 ignore those by setting
SM2_IGNORE_EXT to ".ps;.pdf"!

It should be easy to write a script which creates the ASCII file for each
Postscript/Acrobat file, if it does not already exist. You should run this
script each time you start SM/2 to index new files.